User Reviews

This is a neat little episode. Wonderful to see such an early performance from Ian Holm, who plays a highly repressed and buttoned-down weirdo who seems to have a fetish for confessing to murders he didn't commit. The picture of stolid respectability (a professional man who conducts public opinion questionnaires), occasionally you see the façade cracking, allowing his emotions to bubble up to the surface (e.g at time 14:45 in the episode, you see a flicker of heartbreak when he recalls a past love). He lives with his landlady (played by Beryl Reid, in a performance that reminds me of a more repressed version of her character in Entertaining Mr. Sloane), who is clearly in love with him... but both of them are far too repressed to ever become lovers. However, his whole world is disrupted when his highly manipulative, bullying, childhood friend (played with cheerful menace by Alfred Brooke) decides to move into the house. Without giving spoilers, I'll say that things become very complicated... with the twists and turns continuing to the very last scene.